"I'll be back in a minute," Winnie called. "I'm just getting milk and a newspaper. Why don't you frame one of the paintings in the attic?"
Lloyd heard the front door click shut downstairs. Outside, Winnie's van rumbled to life. He finished shaving, posed briefly in the mirror, and put away the razor.
Lazy Sunday. A warm spring breeze floated in through the bathroom window. On a day like this, getting dressed was more labor than necessary. However, he'd promised his wife he would get their paintings ready to hang. At least three per weekend, and he'd already lost Saturday.
Naked, he trudged up the narrow stair. The attic greeted him with the faint aroma of floor polish. Unlike his last visit, no dust motes danced in the band of light streaming through the skylight. All vacuumed away. The house probably hadn't been this clean since it had been built.
Their tall old clapboard residence was Winnie's project, something to keep her busy when their divergent schedules left her home alone. In the year since they'd bought it, she'd painted walls, recaulked windows, laid new tile. By now she was deep into the embellishments--new drapes, better furniture, and other sprinkles of interior decoration.
And now, the paintings. Winnie had hurdled the obstacle of limited money by scoring two dozen original oils at an estate sale. All by the same artist, all showing views of the town in the 1920s. Not virtuoso work, but well rendered scenes capturing a day and age that now seemed charming. The house belonged to that era, so theme, architecture, and personal taste dovetailed nicely.
The problem was the frames. Lloyd grimaced at the nearest painting, a panorama of the old courthouse square. The frame, clumsily sprayed with gilt and heavily nicked, had the esthetic appeal of a compost heap. Nor did it match the others in the collection. It begged to be replaced with the handsome oak frames and color-coordinated mats that Winnie had bought and left in the attic for Lloyd, who'd had some experience in a framing shop, to see to.
Lloyd set about carefully freeing the artwork from its prison. As he peeled away the backing board, he found three sheets of wrinkled, yellowed notepaper lying in the cavity behind the canvas.
The paper was covered with text, handwritten with a fountain pen, dated May 6, 1928. The first paragraph said, "Here I am, unable to resist again. No one as well-ravished as was I last night should ever want the particulars to fade. I want to read this when I'm eighty-two. I know fifty years will drop away at once, leaving me wet and ready to live another fifty."
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